Vegtabills Velas Manor Improvements

Vegtabill’s Velas Manor Improvements - a mod for the Tribunal Expansion of TES3: Morrowind

GREETINGS! -------------------------------- Hello, and thank you for downloading my modest improvements to Velas Manor! In the following sections I’ll go over what this mod does and why I thought it needed doing, how to install the mod, any possible conflicts with the mod, and a little bit in the way of technical specifics for those interested. But if you really just want to get started with the mod, go right ahead and skip down to the INSTALLATION section. I tend to get a little long-winded, as I’m sure some of you well know!

RATIONALE -------------------------------- Despite what I said above, I think it’s easier to talk about why I think this mod is needed -before- going into what it does, so I’m going to do that now…

I am by no means what you would think of as a “veteran” of Morrowind, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I just picked it up for the first time about a year and a half ago (as of the time of this writing, which is 2014-03-25) after having played Oblivion and Skyrim, in that order, for many, many hours each. For the record, this is one TES4/TES5 player who agrees wholeheartedly that Morrowind is, to date, the best TES has to offer. It just is.

But I digress. Despite being relatively new to Morrowind I have logged well over 1000 hours in and around Vvardenfell, and in that time I have learned that, as wonderful as it is, it definitely has it’s problems. Many of those problems have been modded away by the amazing Morrowind Modding Community, but there are few that persist, largely due to hard-coded imperfections in the game’s engine. One of these “problems” is, of course, the stolen item bug.

I won’t spend a ton of time on this bug. For one thing, there are a number of ways to deal with it; it is by no means a game-breaker. For another thing, it seems that there is only a minority of Morrowind players concerned with the consequences of the bug; indeed, many players are completely unaware of it. But in order to describe 50% of what my mod does, I need to briefly explain a little of the stolen item bug, so I’m going to do that now…

The first relevant part of the bug has to do with item IDs. Basically, if any one item becomes flagged as “stolen”, then every single instance of the stolen item’s ID also becomes flagged stolen. So if you steal one diamond, every single diamond is also “stolen” whether you actually stole any of them or not. There is no in-game fix for this; the only recourse is to edit the save in the Construction Set (CS), Enchanted Editor (EE), or the like. So that’s the first part: once an item is stolen, all of them become stolen.

The second relevant part of the bug has to do with containers. Many of the containers in the game are owned by NPCs. You can see this